Typical computer system designs handle operating system (“OS”) crashes in the following way. After an operating system crashes the memory image that is resident in memory is copied with symbol definitions for various data structures in the OS image to a predefined disk location. This copying is performed prior to returning control back to the system administrator. This process is normally referred to as a system dump. While the memory image is being copied, that operating system image and CPU resources are not available and a lengthy system outage can occur. A system dump in typical systems with real memory sizes in the tens and hundreds of Gigabytes can take hours to complete. The CPU and memory resources need to be exclusively used during this operation to avoid the dump data from being modified and allow the diagnostic data in the dump to be preserved on persistent storage. The reipl of the crashed operating system is serialized behind the system dump operation thus causing a potentially long system outage.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.